Hague gives her campaign no dollars

Filing counters previous report

By GREGORY ROBERTS, P-I REPORTER

Published 10:00 pm, Wednesday, September 26, 2007

This just in: The re-election campaign of King County Councilwoman Jane Hague has formally reported that it received a contribution of zero dollars Monday from Hague and her husband, developer Ed Springman.

If that doesn't sound much like news, well, there's a back story -- just the latest touch of the bizarre in a campaign that turns stranger by the minute.

This particular walk on the odd side began when the Hague campaign filed a report Monday with the state Public Disclosure Commission declaring that the couple had jointly contributed $50,000 that day to Hague, a Bellevue Republican seeking to keep the council seat she has held since 1994.

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Except, campaign spokesman Brett Bader said Wednesday, it never happened.

"No check was ever cut. No check was ever deposited," he said. He has no idea why the report was submitted.

But not long after what Bader called the "inadvertent" electronic filing, the campaign got a call from the commission with word that Hague's Democratic opponent, Bellevue lawyer Richard Pope, had lodged a complaint maintaining that Springer's participation in the $50,000 contribution violated the legal limit on individual donations to political campaigns. That limit is $1,400; there are restrictions on donations from candidates to their own campaigns.

"That was just a chuckler," Bader said of Pope's complaint. The filing Wednesday of an amended report showing no contribution should clear things up, he said.

Pope said Wednesday that he was skeptical of Bader's explanation.

"That's just incredible," he said. "Even if their story is correct, that doesn't put them in a good light, to say the least."

Meanwhile, the commission will meet Wednesday to consider Pope's complaint and to act on a staff report accusing Hague of multiple past campaign finance violations, including late filings, failure to disclose required information about contributors, accepting contributions over legal limits and reimbursing herself from leftover campaign funds for ineligible expenses. Those charges arose from an earlier Pope complaint.

The commission can fine Hague up to $4,200 or refer the case to the state attorney general, who can seek higher penalties in court.

Bader has belittled that complaint as politically motivated, maintaining the violations were "small technical matters."

Pope, 44, is a frequent candidate with an uninterrupted string of 10 election defeats, several of them as a Republican candidate. He won the Democratic nomination for Hague's council seat when no one else filed to run in the primary, in which he defeated a write-in candidate backed by desperate Democratic Party regulars. The King County Democratic Party, as expected, voted Tuesday to withhold its support from him, after his appearance before it.

"I certainly would have appreciated the endorsement," he said. "I don't think it's going to make a major impact on the race."

Democratic chagrin over Pope's default candidacy no doubt increased when it came to light on the day of the primary, Aug. 21, that Hague had been arrested June 2 on a drunken-driving charge -- and had, according to police, cursed the arresting officers. She has apologized for her conduct and pleaded not guilty. A pretrial hearing is scheduled Monday in King County District Court in Redmond.

Hague also acknowledged last week that, in pursuit of a civic group's endorsement in a 1993 campaign, she signed a statement affirming that she had earned a bachelor's degree from Western Michigan University -- when in fact, as Pope had pointed out, she hadn't.

But even without the phantom $50,000 contribution, Hague holds a huge fundraising advantage over Pope. She had drawn more than $220,000 in loans and contributions through Aug. 31, according to Bader and disclosure commission filings, while Pope reported a mostly self-financed total of less than $4,000.